Years 3 -5 Focus
Personalizing Learning with Core Proposition 1:
Teachers are Committed to Students and Their Learning
2020-2021
In the Spring of 2020, we were beginning to plan for year 3 of our work when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Along with schools across the country, we immediately pivoted to online learning and working to support our students and the complexity of their lives. Our students and teachers were also deeply affected by the Black Lives Matter movement that gained steam in the summer of 2020. Louisville is the home of Breonna Taylor, and for many members of our school community, her death felt personal. As a school administration, we hit pause on our plans for the 2020-2021 school year, and instead focused on the needs of our students. Ironically, our plan for the year was to dig deeper into Core Proposition 1, Teachers are committed to students and their learning. Although we abandoned our original plans for implementation, it turned out to be the ideal year to lean into this Core Proposition. As we re-committed ourselves to our students and to their learning, even through a pandemic and social unrest, we learned more about them and about teaching than we ever could if it had been a "normal" school year. We left the 2020-2021 school year with a few key understandings that were not necessarily new, but were newly important to us:
- Our instruction must be personalized to the interests and needs of our students.
- We must be highly selective about which standards are the most essential for our students to truly master.
- It is ok if students demonstrate mastery of standards in a different way or at a different time than their peers.
2021-2022
In the 2021-2022 school year, we refocused ourselves to the three essential lessons we learned in 2020-2021. As we regained our footing and recommitted ourselves to the work we accomplished with Core Prop 3 and Core Prop 2, we took a critical look at our assessment systems. We made the decision to turn away from more traditional "summative" assessment and instead embraced Meaningful Culminating Tasks.
Meaningful Culminating Tasks
What an MCT IS
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What an MCT ISN'T
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*Expectations for using culminating tasks:
-The task should be announced at the beginning of the unit, and referenced regularly (tied to daily LTs)
-As students make progress, grades should be changed/updated in the gradebook
-Students will upload their tasks to the backpack as artifacts
-The task should be announced at the beginning of the unit, and referenced regularly (tied to daily LTs)
-As students make progress, grades should be changed/updated in the gradebook
-Students will upload their tasks to the backpack as artifacts
2022-2023
In May of 2022, our Instructional Leadership Team decided that our work with Meaningful Culminating Tasks was the right work, but we were a long way from where we wanted to be in terms of effectiveness. Our departments spent the year revising and refining the MCTs from the previous year, and we developed a new rubric for PLCs and departments to use when creating and evaluating MCTs.
We also saw a dramatic increase in the number of multi-lingual learners in our population, so we added ML supports to our Core Proposition 1 focus. Celebrating our students' cultures and language skills is an essential aspect of being committed to our students and their learning.
We also saw a dramatic increase in the number of multi-lingual learners in our population, so we added ML supports to our Core Proposition 1 focus. Celebrating our students' cultures and language skills is an essential aspect of being committed to our students and their learning.
If you are you an member of the Kentucky NBPLS community, or you have worked with Kate and would like access to MCT rubrics or other NBPLS resources used by Southern High School, please click the link below.